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"All Along the Watchtower" is a song written and recorded by the American singer-songwriterBob Dylan. The song initially appeared on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding, and it has been included on most of Dylan's subsequent greatest hits compilations. Since the late 1970s, he has performed it in concert more than any of his other songs. Different versions appear on four of Dylan's live albums.[1]

Following a motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent the next 18 months recuperating at his home in Woodstock and writing songs.[3] According to Clinton Heylin, all the songs for John Wesley Harding were written and recorded during a six-week period at the end of 1967.[4] With one child born in early 1966 and another in mid-1967, Dylan had settled into family life.

The final version of "All Along the Watchtower" resulted from two different takes during the second of three John Wesley Harding sessions. The session opened with five takes of the song, the third and fifth of which were spliced to create the album track.[5] As with most of the album's selections, the song is a dark, sparse work that stands in stark contrast with Dylan's previous recordings of the mid-1960s.[7]

Several reviewers have pointed out that the lyrics in "All Along the Watchtower" echo lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.[8][9]

"I haven't fulfilled the balladeers's job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half... it can all unfold to you. These melodies on John Wesley Harding lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of "The Wicked Messenger", which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider... The same thing is true of the song "All Along the Watchtower", which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order."[10]

”

The unusual structure of the narrative was remarked on by English Literature professor Christopher Ricks, who commented that "All Along the Watchtower" is an example of Dylan's audacity at manipulating chronological time: "at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again."[11]

Heylin described Dylan's narrative technique in "Watchtower" as setting the listener up for an epic ballad with the first two verses, but then, after a brief instrumental passage, the singer cuts "to the end of the song, leaving the listener to fill in his or her own (doom-laden) blanks."[4]

Critics have described Dylan's version as a masterpiece of understatement. Andy Gill said "In Dylan's version of the song, it's the barrenness of the scenario which grips, the high haunting harmonica and simple forward motion of the riff carrying understated implications of cataclysm; as subsequently recorded by Jimi Hendrix, ... that cataclysm is rendered scarily palpable through the dervish whirls of guitar."[12]

Dave Van Ronk, an early supporter and mentor of Dylan, disagreed with the majority view when he made the following criticism:

That whole artistic mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility. Dylan has a lot to answer for there, because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything—he was Bob Dylan and people would take whatever he wrote on faith. So he could do something like "All Along the Watchtower," which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it.[13]

John Wesley Harding came out at the end of 1967, on December 27, less than two months after the recording sessions.[14] The song was the second single from the album, released on November 22, 1968, but did not chart. A live recording of "All Along the Watchtower" from the album Before the Flood appeared as the B side of "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" in 1974. The recordings came from separate concerts earlier that year at the Forum outside Los Angeles, both with Dylan backed by The Band.[5]

Dylan first performed the song live on January 3, 1974, in Chicago on the opening night of his 'comeback tour'.[1] From this first live performance, Dylan has consistently performed the song closer to Hendrix's version than to his own original recording.[1] In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, critic Michael Gray wrote that this is the most often performed of all of Dylan's songs. By Gray's count, Dylan had performed the song in concert 1,393 times by the end of 2003.[1] According to Dylan's own website, by 2012 he had performed the song 2,034 times.[15]

In recent years, Dylan in live performances has taken to singing the first verse again at the end of the song. As Gray notes in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

"Dylan chooses to end in a way that at once reduces the song's apocalyptic impact and cranks up its emphasis on the artist's own centrality. Repeating the first stanza as the last means Dylan now ends with the words 'None of them along the line/Know what any of it is worth' (and this is sung with a prolonged, dark linger on that word 'worth')."[1]

Dylan possibly was following the lead of the Grateful Dead in concluding the song by repeating the first verse; the Dead covered the song in this fashion, both with and without Dylan.[16]

The original recording of "All Along the Watchtower" appears on most of Dylan's "greatest hits" albums, as well as his two box set compilations, Biograph, released in 1985, and Dylan, released in 2007. In addition, Dylan has released live recordings of the song on the following albums: Before the Flood (recorded February 1974); Bob Dylan at Budokan (recorded March 1978); Dylan & The Dead (recorded July 1987); and MTV Unplugged (recorded November 1994).[1][17]

The Jimi Hendrix Experience began to record their cover version of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" on January 21, 1968, at Olympic Studios in London.[18] According to engineer Andy Johns, Jimi Hendrix had been given a tape of Dylan’s recording by publicist Michael Goldstein, who worked for Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. "(Hendrix) came in with these Dylan tapes and we all heard them for the first time in the studio”, recalled Johns.[19] According to Hendrix’s regular engineer Eddie Kramer, the guitarist cut a large number of takes on the first day, shouting chord changes at Dave Mason who had appeared at the session and played guitar. Halfway through the session, bass player Noel Redding became dissatisfied with the proceedings and left. Mason then took over on bass. According to Kramer, the final bass part was played by Hendrix himself.[19] Hendrix's friend, and Rolling Stones multi-instrumentalist, Brian Jones played the various percussion instruments on the track. Jones originally recorded a piano part that was later mixed out in place of the percussion instruments. Kramer and Chas Chandler mixed the first version of "All Along the Watchtower" on January 26, but Hendrix was quickly dissatisfied with the result and went on re-recording and overdubbing guitar parts during June, July, and August at the Record Plant studio in New York.[20] Engineer Tony Bongiovi has described Hendrix becoming increasingly dissatisfied as the song progressed, overdubbing more and more guitar parts, moving the master tape from a four-track to a twelve-track to a sixteen-track machine. Bongiovi recalled, "Recording these new ideas meant he would have to erase something. In the weeks prior to the mixing, we had already recorded a number of overdubs, wiping track after track. [Hendrix] kept saying, 'I think I hear it a little bit differently.'"[21] The finished version was released on the album Electric Ladyland in September 1968. The single reached number five in the British charts,[22] and number 20 on the Billboard chart, Hendrix's only top 20 entry there.[23] The song also had the number 5 spot on Guitar World's 100 Greatest Guitar Solos.[24]

Dylan has described his reaction to hearing Hendrix's version: "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."[25] In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan said: "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way... Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

The earliest recording of the song, other than by Dylan, was by British pop group The Nashville Teens, who had previously had a hit in 1964 with the song "Tobacco Road". Their recording of "All Along the Watchtower", produced by Vic Smith, was released as a single in the UK and Europe on Decca Records in March 1968, some six months before Hendrix's version. The recording was described by the NME as "both effective and commendable", and by Record Mirror as a "reasonably strong song idea", but failed to have any commercial success, and the band left the Decca label soon afterwards.[28][29]

Dave Matthews Band has played the song since the band's inception in the early 1990s.[30] Their rendition maintains Dylan's three chord structure and key signature but differs in style. Dave Matthews typically begins the song slowly with just bass, vocals and acoustic guitar. The band members come in after the line "the hour is getting late", picking up the tempo and intensity. The band's members then take extended solos, culminating with the line, "No reason to get excited." "Watchtower", as it is referred to by the band's fans, is a concert staple, often performed as either a closer or encore. In all, they have covered the song live more than 600 times, including solo performances by Matthews,[30] and it has appeared on nine of their officially released live albums, though the band has never released a studio version.

Irish rock band U2 first played a cover of "All Along the Watchtower" during their Boy Tour in 1981.[32] Years later, during the Joshua Tree Tour in 1987,[33] the cover was played for a second time, in San Francisco, California, with an additional verse added by Bono. This performance was later included as a scene in U2's 1988 rockumentary film, Rattle and Hum, and also appeared on the album of the same name. The performance was impromptu, with the band learning the chords and lyrics within minutes of taking the stage, and as a result, there were problems in editing the soundtrack. The song made its way into 47 live shows during the band's 1989 Lovetown Tour.[34]

Television composer Bear McCreary arranged a distinctive version of "All Along the Watchtower" for use in the final scene of the Battlestar Galactica season three finale "Crossroads, Part II", featuring his younger brother Brendan on vocals. A version with all the lyrics was included on the season 3 soundtrack. The lyrics had been written into the screenplay by Ronald D. Moore.[37] The song became a thematic motif as well as a critical plot element of the show, with lyrics frequently referenced in dialog and several versions of the melody playing out throughout the show's final season. The series' last episode played out to the Jimi Hendrix version of the song.

Steve Hackett played a powerful live version of the song during a show at the Shepherd's Bush Empire[38] with John Wetton on lead vocals (2010). Then he created a studio version of the song (also with John Wetton on vocals) for the new remastered edition of the Tokyo Tapes live album (2013). All Along the Watchtower's studio version involved: Steve Hackett on guitars and percussion, John Wetton on vocals, Roger King on keyboards, Lee Pomeroy on Bass and Garry O'Toole on drums. The initial live version include the same band except Nick Beggs on bass instead of Lee Pomeroy and Amanda Lehmann in a 2nd guitar part.